Sunday, December 28, 2014

Trashes and treasures

First of all, my family, none of you are part of what I'm planning to haul to the curb.  Despite occasional threats over the years to sell any/all of you to the gypsies, this tidying up doesn't include any big dramas, or made-for-TV movie plots with estranged family members and sordid surprises. This is just about stuff.  Personal stuff.  My stuff.  And clearing out a space to live better without so much stuff.

That said, eventually I'll get to the basement -- ground zero for all kinds of emotional and physical baggage -- and we'll probably be having a discussion about your model airplanes, school projects, and who knows what that you've stored there over the years.  Stored and forgotten, as you've grown up and gone off to build new collections of stuff in your own homes. Just because there's room for it in my basement doesn't mean there's room for it in my basement.  I've got my own collections of scary basement archives and surprises to deal with.

But the basement is for much, much later.

My new little guidebook recommends tidying up by category of stuff, not by room.  It recommends removing every object in a selected category from its storage place(s) all over the house, putting everything in a pile, then quickly sorting while keeping only what gives you "a spark of joy". I see the logic and I think I agree, but that's just not going to be practical for me.

The guidebook author is Japanese, and lives in Tokyo.  I've been to a couple private homes in Japan.  They were just lovely -- nicely laid out, calming and restful.  But even the wealthy person's house that I visited was not notable for its rambling size and spacious storage (although the garden was incredible).  Let's face it, we just have more stuff in the U.S. and we like to spread it out. A lot. Besides, gathering up up all my books or clothes or whatever into a huge pile waiting to be sorted would probably give my organized and neurotic psyche a complete meltdown.  So I'll figure out how to honor the intent of that recommendation, sorting quickly and thoroughly without needing to medicate myself in the process.

The author also recommends tackling non-emotional stuff first, which makes perfect sense.  Then she recommends starting with clothes, which makes no sense.  Clothes, not emotionally charged?

Yeah, right.

The author is a very beautiful, very young, petite woman.  I'm betting she has never had to deal with whether to keep the fat pants in case the skinny pants suddenly don't fit, or admit that clothes that looked great only a year or so ago are suddenly all wrong.  She's never had to set aside styles that worked well for decades (a favorite color that's now harsh, a neckline that has gone from flattering to aging) and then figure out how to evolve her look, being true to herself as she is today.  In short, she's never been a fifty-something-year-old woman.  She's right about the clean up, but it's hardly non-emotional.

So I'll be starting this tidying up process with something a little less traumatizing.


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